As has been written about—at length—elsewhere, much of the biotech world awaits the outcome of a patent dispute over CRISPR, a revolutionary form of gene-editing biotechnology worth many billions of dollars. Unlike a typical patent dispute in federal court, however, the CRISPR patent dispute—between the University of California-Berkeley and the Broad Institute of Cambridge, Mass.—is being waged at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in an arcane administrative procedure known as an “interference.” Interferences, broadly conceived, are administrative trials to determine which of two (or more) parties invented something first. These procedures are rare, peculiar and, thanks to a 2011 change in U.S. patent law, dying. Much of the uncertainty surrounding the CRISPR patent dispute stems from uncertainties in the interference process itself.
